Top 45 Alan Stern Quotes

I tend to think of Pluto and its moons as presents sitting under a Christmas tree. They’re wrapped, and from Earth all we can do is look at the boxes to see whether they’re light or heavy, to see if something maybe jiggles a bit inside. We’re seeing intriguing things, but we really don’t know what’s in there.

Competition-driven innovation and price pressure that commercial practices foster can only make human spaceflight ever more common and U.S. leadership in this domain ever clearer.

In science, we take large numbers of disparate facts and reduce them to see patterns. We use the patterns to reduce the amount of information. It’s the reason we name species and genera and families in biology. It’s also the reason we have names for certain types of geological features and so on in other fields.

Pluto is still active four and a half billion years into its history. It was expected that small planets like Pluto would cool off long ago and not still be showing geological activity. Pluto is, in fact, showing numerous examples of geological activity on a massive scale across the planet.

CSF and its members believe strongly in the exploration of space of all kinds, including commercial purposes.

We’re going to find Marses and maybe Earths out in the solar system’s attic of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt.

Pluto is as far across as Manhattan to Miami, but its atmosphere is bigger than the Earth’s.

It says something very deep about humans and our society, something very good about us, that we’ve invested our time and treasure in building a machine that can fly across three billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system.

I think that one of the things that will come out of the New Horizons mission is that the public will take a look, and they won’t know what else to call Pluto but a planet – and a pretty exciting one.

I like the planets because they are real places that you can go to and send machines to. Faraway astronomy – galactic astronomy and extra-galactic astronomy – is really cool stuff, but to me, it’s about destinations.

When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a long list of how often I’ve been surprised by the richness of nature.

The big lesson of planetary science is when you do a first reconnaissance of a new kind of object, you should expect the unexpected.

As a scientist in charge of space sensors and entire space missions before I was at NASA, I myself was involved in projects that overran. But that’s no excuse for remaining silent about this growing problem or failing to champion reform.

Just because Pluto or comets aren’t as big as Jupiter doesn’t mean they are not scientifically important – indeed, just the reverse is often true. Sometimes, great things come in small packages.

The New Horizons Pluto mission will be the first mission to a binary object and will help us understand everything from the origin of Earth’s moon to the physics of mass transfer between binary stars.

The first mission to Mars did not expect to find craters and river valleys, and yet they did. The first mission to Jupiter didn’t expect to find ocean worlds and volcano worlds, but they did.

Pluto has a very interesting history, and there is a lot of work that we need to do to understand this very complicated place.

We made more than just scientific discoveries… we rediscovered how much people love exploration.

Back before the Kuiper Belt was discovered, Pluto did look like a misfit that didn’t belong with either the terrestrials or the giant planets.

We were very surprised to find out that Pluto is still geologically alive. It has upended our ideas of how planetary geophysics works.

If the Pluto mission was a cat, then it would’ve been dead long ago because they only get nine lives, and we’ve had significantly more than nine stoppages and odd twists and turns.

New Horizons isn’t just visiting Pluto; it’s visiting this entire region. Whatever it finds, this will be a signal moment for planetary exploration – the capstone to our first reconnaissance of the planets of our solar system.

If you go to planetary science meetings and hear technical talks on Pluto, you will hear experts calling it a planet every day.

As a planetary scientist, I don’t know what else to call Pluto: It’s big and round and thousands of miles wide.

Pluto and its brethren are the most populous class of planets in our solar system.

That so many binary or quasi-binary KBOs exist came as a real surprise to the research community.

I tell public audiences, don’t go to a podiatrist for brain surgery; don’t go to an astronomer for planetary science.

The solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I’m sure we would learn a lot.

During one of the Apollo missions, I saw Walter Cronkite showing off the flight plan. It just mesmerized me. All this detail! That’s what I wanted.

The Kuiper belt region, which I call the third zone because it lies beyond the rocky terrestrial planets and beyond the giant planets, is a bizarre frontier.

You could not have predicted the amazing discoveries at Pluto, even though we have been to a couple of objects in the solar system that were at least a little analogous to Pluto.

Typically in science, individual scientists make up their minds about scientific fact or theory one at a time. We don’t take votes. We just don’t vote on quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, why the sky is blue, or anything else.

Either data supports the observations or they don’t. Voting doesn’t work in science.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

To say that what a planet is doesn’t matter would be to imply that a planetary scientist couldn’t explain to someone what the field is about.

I’m hopeful that commercial space exploration will takeoff. To really fuel the spaceflight revolution will require an investment of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and I think that’s only going to happen in the commercial sector – if there are large profits to be made.

It shouldn’t be so difficult to determine what a planet is. When you’re watching a science fiction show like ‘Star Trek’ and they show up at some object in space and turn on the viewfinder, the audience and the people in the show know immediately whether it’s a planet or a star or a comet or an asteroid.

New Horizons is a very high-tech, small, roughly 1,000-pound spacecraft with the most powerful battery of scientific instrumentation ever brought to bear on a first reconnaissance mission.

Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system.

Having a diverse suite of U.S.-manned spaceflight systems to access space is inherently robust.

It’s interesting – Pluto’s almost a brand unto itself. It’s the farthest. It’s the most diminutive of the classical planets. It’s been maligned by astronomers. It’s always the one with all the question marks in the back of the textbook in the table. I think children identify with it because it’s smaller, kind of cute.

No one predicted Mercury would be a planetary core with the mantle stripped off. No one predicted volcanoes on the Jovian moons, or oceans on the inside of them. I can tell you, for every single planet, huge ‘we never guessed that’ things.

It’s very hard to motivate yourself and others with only one goal – particularly if it’s complex and you might not get there until years down the road. That’s why intermediate goals are so important.

To keep everyone invested in your vision, you have to back up a little bit and really analyze who the different stakeholders are and what they individually respond to.

One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.